I’m old enough to look back on my life and to say confidently that there are difficult, sad, even horrible moments in my past that have made my life as a whole better. I have a strange relation to those moments: though their wound has long since been covered over, I would never want to repeat them; I do not remember them with anything like fondness or nostalgia. In spite of that, I am in a strange sense thankful for them. <\/p>\n
This morning I realized that I have something like the same feeling about the suffering of others. I learned recently that a friend’s wife is having a difficult pregnancy. I think I’ve only met her once, but I have known him for years and like him very much, so my liking extends to her transitively. As a result, in the middle of some daily task\u00e2\u20ac\u201dtranslating a sentence from Levinas, deciding how to compose a paragraph that others will understand, explaining philosophy to a student, preparing materials for next semester’s course\u00e2\u20ac\u201dI find myself called to silent prayer for them. From nowhere, as it were, a need makes itself known, a need to pray. <\/p>\n
That call to prayer, a call initiated by their suffering, does at least two things (which may be one): It does something the Sacrament prayers first do, calling me to a religious life in my ordinary life by calling me to remembrance and to prayer. In addition, it humanizes me: to remember them in their difficulty is to remember that I am a human being tied to them in suffering. (Hence, Mosiah 18:8-9.) The result is almost shameful to say: I am strangely thankful for their suffering. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3624\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}